What Cuba is doing is very inspiring. However, it seems that the very idea of having that many people in one place is an energy sink. There just seems to be something wrong about covering kilometres of area in concrete and buildings or someother arangement that stops other life from using the area. Nomadic tribes are able to move from an area and allow it to regenerate. Cities kill an area. You can put farms on top of it, but you can’t really allow wild life access to it. Maybe we don’t need to.

Concentration of resources by way of a community growing its own food made way for the development of cities with concentrations of people, and in the first cities was where class differentiation and stratification came into being, or so I have heard. So are cities the root of all evil? I don’t think so. A lot of our living can be done more efficiently in cities, plus cities have exciting mixes of people and all kinds of creative things happening, so I wouldn’t want to give them up altogether. If we could toss out (or recycle) the bathwater and save the baby, that would be really nice.

Anyway, I’m not sure there are many locations where people can get all they need to subsist right where they are. Certainly not enough such locations to go around. If we really want to feed all the people instead of letting most of them die of starvation, we cannot go back to earlier ways. And it goes without saying that we cannot continue our current ways either.

This is where our much-vaunted human intelligence comes in, or should. Outside the town where I live, up on the hills, there are beautiful, giant windmills. Not old-fashioned windmills, but windmills that took a lot of fancy engineering by very well-educated people to design. Probably foreigners to this country designed these things. But they work for this country. Beautiful windmills going up everywhere! God, I love technology. Now all we need are more bicycles, and more people on them. Bicycles are the best thing ever invented.

You know we have lived with the imminent apocalypse in one form or another since the fifties. Therefore, we really are like the frog in the pot of hot water that is getting hotter.

For a small community, or even a small country, to develop solutions and implement them is not impossible. It happens. Maybe Cuba is an example. New Zealand could be one, too, if it doesn’t get caught up in wanting to catch up with the rest of the OEDC.

The problem is that a small country or community is vulnerable to predation, and may be increasingly so as the global crisis deepens. Maybe the trick is to have nothing worth stealing, or capable of being stolen. They can steal the water from our aquifers, but can they steal our rain? They can ruin our lovely fresh air if they really want to, but can they steal it? Oxygen can be bought and sold, in relatively small quantities (relatively compare to all that is in the atmosphere, I mean) but can they steal the whole atmosphere? Can they steal the whole ocean? They can destroy it, but can they steal it?

Technology does not just mean things made of steel and plastic. It means invention and discovery. The development of gardening itself was a technological advance. As I understand it, it happened when the world could no longer support the burgeoning population of human foragers. So a few started working on cultivation of plants and domestication of animals, and it caught on. Now we in the North have to learn how to live on less. Make an art of it. Be proud of it. Let our neighbors come to our door and ask to know our secrets.

Lots of folks these days practice conservation. It is sort of catching on. In parts of the global South, conservation is a way of life. It’s not a prestigious way of life, but at least people know how to do it, really well. So we can solve part of the problem by practicing conservation.

The other part of the problem, dealing with the military and economic predators, is harder. And interestingly, it appears that the economic predators are harder to hold at bay than the military ones.

Just thinking out loud

As for the technological solution, my own favorite example, which would be laughable were it not the indicator of a mental blidspot so scary in its implications, is when people talk about planting colonies on Mars or the Moon for us humans to move to when we destroy the Earth. It was expressed to me recently by one guy in the form of “if we destroy the Earth we can just build a new one.” Really? So, having inherited the only planet and ecosphere that our species has ever known, a pretty damn nice place when it comes down to it, the occasional natural disaster aside, and having been unable to live in it or with it, we are somehow going to use the same technology that fucked it up to construct an alternative from scratch? That takes more faith than believing Jesus could turn water into wine.

This is where we have to put on our critical thinking caps again, because its pretty hard to lay claim to the movement for scientific socialism when you ignore science. The earth certainly does have a carrying capacity. That is not the same as the claims inhering in racist Malthusianism, that we have a “population” problem. That inherent claim is that ths is a result of our genes (Dawkins, are you there?), which again naturalizes the processes we see, and lets the ruling stratum off the hook. The malthusian outbreak of population, which is easily seen on any world population chart is a result of capitalism (with its carcinomic growth imperative), and which always seeks to expand capital by any means necessary (which led directly to industrialization). Hornborg shows how industrialization is not innocent of social relations, how the claim that capital-expansive technology cannot become socialist by placing it in the hands of socialists. It is marked by its exploitative nature.

The emergence of socialist STATES that attempted to “build” socialism in 20C, inside a capitalist world system, using capitalist technology, which requires capitalist productive relations…. NEVER escaped, leapt over, transcended the fact that it was articulated firmly WITHIN a world capitalist system.

It’s adoption of “advanced” industrial technology was a survival necessity; but over time the socialist-state propagandists got caught up in their own dogwaggery… justifying the contingent necessity as the best of all possible worlds, and making the idiotic claim that socialist industrialism could outdo capitalist industrialism. But there was never any such thing as socialist industrialism… again, as Hornborg points out, this was the fetishization of machines. There were socialist states attempting to defend themselves from capitalist states with the master’s tools.

We can certainly live sustainably without all reverting to hunting and gathering, but without some fairly drastic corrections, for which ther precondition is the acquisition of political power. If not, civilizaitonal collapse is the likely scenario, and sooner than many might think.

Cities, as currently constructed, are vast energy sinks. You got that right. But Cuba is showing that we can begin backing away from this abyss, one careful step at a time, if we can show the political will.

I remember having a discussion where Cuba’s urban community gardens were mentioned. People were very against the idea that this might be adopted as a general practice, outside of an isolated crisis’s. The thought of having to spend their time growing their own food was repugnant.

They seem to have this belief/dream that socialism means that everyone will live with first world middle class technologies. The fact that we’ve run out of resources to provide that for the few who have it now doesn’t seem to bother them. The revolution will solve all that.

I’m glad to see some people talking about carrying capacity as well. Most socialists I speak to about this dismiss the idea itself as being racist. It has no doubt sometimes been used for racist ends but that does not rule out the fact that it exists and that we may have exceeded it.

I’m wondering how or if people think that these ideas tie in with primitivist/neo-luddite ideas? A quick introduction into the ideas that I have found interesting are essentially the belief that all civilisation is unsustainable. Civilisation being living in cities. Cities being a people living in groups large enough to require the importation of resources. The reason being that if you require the importation of resources the means you have denuded the land base of that particular resource. The more your city grows the more you will continue to fuck up the planet.
Basically it is an assertion that the only way to live sustainabley is in hunter-gatherer type communities.